tawny grammar

Wanted: Hairy hermit

steve — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:06:58 GMT

Complete silence, a ban on bathing and a love of solitude are all part of the job description for a unique position that has become available at Tatton Park – after remaining vacant for the last 150 years.

Head gardener Sam Youd is appealing for an individual showing promise as a modern-day hermit to take residence in his Hermit’s Grotto garden, which will be on display at the RHS Show Tatton Park this month.[…]

The successful candidate must take a vow of silence and be able to live alongside a skull, to encourage human reflection.

@ Liverpool Daily Post (via Hermitary)

Ah, if only this were closer to home — it would be such wonderful research for the novel I’m working on.

Why Starting A Book Is Hard

steve — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:12:33 GMT

As soon as we feel that the writing we are contemplating matters, our defensive system kicks in, and our fear that we can’t think well enough raises its ugly head. We are wrestled to the ground by the fact that we are trying to matter.

@ The Rumpus

And sometimes we are wrestled to the ground by the fear we have an idea with such potential that it deserves a better writer to execute it.

Animal stories

steve — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:32:18 GMT

Animal Inventory: Towards the end of the book, you state that we need “to finally get past ourselves and our story and, through acts of deep, interspecies empathy…to become a part of [other animals’] story (p 175).” On the one hand this seems like a simple request, but on the other hand this requires a radical shift in perspective. Can you explain what you mean by this?

Charles Siebert: In one sense this involves us human beings collectively coming down off of our high horse, if you’ll excuse the old expression. The more we begin to see and understand ourselves as one more extension of the greater biological forces that created and control all life on earth, rather than as beings apart, entities anointed by some higher authority, the more the “inter-species empathy” I speak of, or what Gay Bradshaw calls the “trans-species psyche”, will be allowed to flourish. This will all still bring us to the same tough decisions and compromises that I alluded to earlier, but what a better premise it is to approach them from such a new collective interspecies empathy, as opposed to the ongoing parochial factionalism rooted in old rival religions and the false notion of human exclusivity.

Tree museums

steve — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:54:20 GMT

Forest Walk proposes to document intercity at-risk streetscapes in Toronto. It also documents inviting lush, green, deep forest vistas, pathways and clearings outside the city. The images take the form of a series of banners dislocated from their original setting. The streetscape banners are installed in the forest at the Tree Museum while the forest images are installed on Bloor Street, in Toronto. […] The exchange of images and locations in the project explores urban dreams of reconnecting with nature and the vulnerability of existing forest areas. Both zones—city and country—are at-risk in a rapid-growth world economy and its related global warming.

~ Dyan Marie @ The Tree Museum

Also, Artisan Woods and another Tree Museum

Minimalism

steve — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:50:12 GMT

The problem inheres in the notion of simplicity: if both its preferred subject and its preferred approach are simple, what is it that justifies the minimalist enterprise? In other words, what saves minimalism from banality? For Nicholas Serota and Richard Francis, the answer lies in the fact that minimalism reinvests the ordinary with interest and attempts to persuade us that the apparent banality of our quotidian experience deserves immediate, direct examination: “By shifting emphasis so emphatically to direct experience Minimalist art makes a clear statement about the nature of reality. Its apparent simplicity is the result of rigorous focusing, the elimination of distraction. It is neither simple nor empty, cold nor obscure. Minimalism reorders values. It locates profound experience in ordinary experience” (Saltzman).

~ Warren Motte, Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature